Online financial organization has just grown more robust as Mint.com and offline incumbent Quicken both introduced new features to their web-based products. Since Mint.com and Quicken Online have similar purposes and functionality in mind, we thought it was time to take a comparative look at how a company from the new social media realm stacks up against a desktop software giant when it comes to online money management.

What’s new

Kicking off the round of announcements, Mint.com showed new features that provide customizability, investment tracking for all users, and an end to the product’s “beta” status. A Mint spokesperson told Ars that registrations are up 100 percent over the past month and that the site now boasts over 500,000 users. So far, Mint has tracked nearly $15 billion in assets and over $160 billion in purchases, which gives the company “tremendous” insight into trends such as an overall average spending decline among users of $300 per month since January 2008.

Mint’s first new feature is custom budget categories, which has been at the top of the company’s request list for some time. Sub-categories can be added to Mint’s existing set of main categories, though new main categories cannot be created at this time.

The next new feature is a more in-depth set of investment tracking features (just in time!) that were first introduced in beta for a select group of users back in April. Users can see all their holdings across brokerage, 401k, IRA, and 529 accounts, and they can view investment performance across all accounts or drill down into a specific one. Users can now analyze cost basis vs. performance, as well as performance by asset allocation. While Mint can also display over 100 investment transaction types like all buys, sells, straddles, and dividends now, it cannot yet help make any of these transactions.